Transformers One Poster From Studio Trigger

If anyone in the US is interested in how we're coping with Trump overseas, today one of my colleagues who specialises in European policy just emailed me with the opener of 'Hi Hannah, hope you're doing well despite Trump'. So there's that.

(NO, PHILIPPE. NO, I AM NOT DOING WELL DESPITE TRUMP.)

I was looking for movies to watch on hbo and i'm fucking howling at this

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

Nope now it’s at the point that i’m shocked that people off tt don’t know what’s going down. I have no reach but i’ll sum it up anyway.

SCOTUS is hearing on the constitutionality of the ban as tiktok and creators are arguing that it is a violation of our first amendment rights to free speech, freedom of the press and freedom to assemble.

SCOTUS: tiktok bad, big security concern because china bad!

Tiktok lawyers: if china is such a concern why are you singling us out? Why not SHEIN or temu which collect far more information and are less transparent with their users?

SCOTUS (out loud): well you see we don’t like how users are communicating with each other, it’s making them more anti-american and china could disseminate pro china propaganda (get it? They literally said they do not like how we Speak or how we Assemble. Independent journalists reach their audience on tt meaning they have Press they want to suppress)

Tiktok users: this is fucking bullshit i don’t want to lose this community what should we do? We don’t want to go to meta or x because they both lobbied congress to ban tiktok (free market capitalism amirite? Paying off your local congressmen to suppress the competition is totally what the free market is about) but nothing else is like TikTok

A few users: what about xiaohongshu? It’s the Chinese version of tiktok (not quite, douyin is the chinese tiktok but it’s primarily for younger users so xiaohongshu was chosen)

16 hours later:

Tiktok as a community has chosen to collectively migrate TO a chinese owned app that is purely in Chinese out of utter spite and contempt for meta/x and the gov that is backing them.

My fyp is a mix of “i would rather mail memes to my friends than ever return to instagram reels” and “i will xerox my data to xi jinping myself i do not care i share my ss# with 5 other people anyway” and “im just getting ready for my day with my chinese made coffee maker and my Chinese made blowdryer and my chinese made clothing and listening to a podcast on my chinese made phone and get in my car running on chinese manufactured microchips but logging into a chinese social media? Too much for our gov!” etc.

So the government was scared that tiktok was creating a sense of class consciousness and tried to kill it but by doing so they sent us all to xiaohongshu. And now? Oh it’s adorable seeing this gov-manufactured divide be crossed in such a way.

This is adorable and so not what they were expecting. Im sure they were expecting a reluctant return to reels and shorts to fill the void but tiktokers said fuck that, we will forge connections across the world. Who you tell me is my enemy i will make my friend. That’s pretty damn cool.

Invalid reasons for why a character should not be redeemed:

They’re too evil! - Redemption has nothing to do with how good or evil you were to begin with.

They don’t deserve it! - Redemption is not something that can be “deserved.”

Their actions are unforgivable! - Redemption has nothing to do with forgiveness.

It’s too late for them to change! - It is only “too late” to choose redemption when a character is dead (unless the scope of the story includes an afterlife in which change is possible).

Valid reasons for why a character should not be redeemed:

It doesn’t fit the themes of the story.

They’re not an important enough character for showing the process of a redemption arc to be worthwhile.

They’re more interesting as a character who isn’t doing the right thing.

It’s more satisfying to let them keep being evil.

It makes it more satisfying when they die.

There’s probably more, but you get the idea.

Remember, redemption is when someone realizes they are wrong, and takes steps to doing the right thing. That is not something that can be “deserved,” it is not something that hinges on forgiveness, and it is not something that it is ever too late for! …Unless the person is dead or something.

being a humanities major who’s friends with stem majors is so funny because you’ll ask your friends what they’re doing today and they’re like “UGH it’s so stressful i have to stabilize the reactor core for my nuclear power midterm and then i have to build the supercomputer from i have no mouth yet i must scream for my electrical engineering homework :/ what about you” and you’re like “oh well i have to read a fun little book and write an essay about gender.” and they still think you have it worse

okay none of us can change what has happened. what you have to do now is, in the spirit of any airplane safety discussion, put on your own mask. you need to take care of yourself. go outside, get sun on your face, breathe a little, eat something, hot shower, make a grim joke with someone you care about, and do not let yourself get in a hole. and then when you feel a little better and only then, you can think about what's coming. and know the difference between what you can change and what you can't. not in a despairing way but because: there are so many things you can change and they are small but they are closer to you and so they will feel bigger.

but that's later. for now please take care of yourselves first ♥️